Exhibitions
VICTOR PASMORE, LINE & SPACE
Marlborough, London 12th April to 4th June
Abstract art, other than bland stuff on office reception walls, is somehow unbritish.
Some leading 20th-century British painters who tried it drifted back towards the romantic, pastoral tradition – including Sutherland, Hitchens and Lanyon.
Those who most appeal to a wide public, among them Terry Frost, Gillian Ayres and Bridget Riley, had strongly individual personalities which somehow humanise the work. And the few purists with international reputations, notably Ben Nicholson, may be revered by the art world but are not particularly popular.
There is discreet poetry in Nicholson, but I would still rather have a wonderfully melancholic landscape or still life by his father, William Nicholson, on my wall.
Victor Pasmore (1908-98), who has been described as ‘Britain’s pre-eminent abstract artist’, began as a still-life, figurative and landscape painter, but once he had turned abstract he did not turn back.
He was encouraged to paint during his Harrow schooldays; despite the school’s reputation for heartiness, art was taken seriously. The teachers were M Clarke and J M Holmes, otherwise unknown to art history, who encouraged him to read Chevreul’s 1855 work on the harmonics of colours, as well as Leonardo’s notebooks, and introduced him to the theories of Impressionism.
His father’s death ruled out university but, while working as a clerk, he took lessons at the Central School of Arts and Crafts with A S Hartrick, the lithographer and friend of Van Gogh and Toulouse-lautrec.
In 1934, he joined the London Group and participated in the Objective Abstractions exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery, although his contributions were far from abstract. He then joined up with William Coldstream and Graham Bell to launch the Euston Road School of Drawing and Painting.
In 1942, Clive Bell predicted that Pasmore’s ‘art will not stand still’. He was right, but it was only after the Second World War, during which he had been a conscientious objector, that Pasmore abandoned representational painting completely for pure abstraction and constructivist sculpture.
He could also be considered an abstract architect. In 1955, he was appointed director of architectural design for Peterlee, the new town in Durham, for which he created the equally loved and loathed Apollo Pavilion – essentially a Brutalist sculpture.
This major show had a patchy existence at Hastings Contemporary last year. Now that it can be seen properly at Marlborough, it will be good to find out if it does full justice to a career that Tate Gallery director Alan Bowness labelled ‘a succession of metamorphoses that have at various times dismayed, astonished and delighted his admirers’.